Middle-aged, middle-class drug use has left the State’s poorest areas struggling with the violence the illegal trade causes, former Garda commissioner Drew Harris has said.
Prosperity is fuelling demand, especially “the attraction” to cocaine, which is seen by middle-class users “as a way of avoiding weight gain, and an alternative to buying four or five rounds of drink,” he said.
Cocaine has been “normalised and regrettably normalised” among the professional classes, said Harris, who led the Garda between 2018 and his retirement last September.
“The societal damage may not happen in Dublin 4, but it’s happening in Dublin 15,” Harris told the Patrick MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co Donegal.
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Younger people are today less likely to be using illegal drugs, he said, while people in their 30s, 40s or 50s are “driving a lot of the demand”, but are “able to skip off into the sunset pretty unperturbed” by the consequences.
Public debate should centre on the damage caused by middle-class drugs use to working class districts who are “the ones being ravaged by the gangs, with young men, young women being coerced or driven into this”.
“Drugs intimidation is happening to working-class families. That’s my experience. Like all crime, it hits somebody hard, but it’s not fair in where it lands.”
Despite victories over the Kinahan organised crime gang and other groups, Harris said he was “slightly more pessimistic” than others about the ability of the Garda to win the battle.
Forty years ago when he joined the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Harris said it had been “a big deal to get somebody with cannabis”, before police were quickly “chasing the kilo of cocaine”.
Paying tribute to the late assistant Garda commissioner John O’Driscoll and Irish diplomats in Dubai and in the United States, he said they had built relations with authorities in both places.
Back then, there had been “a lot of talk” about Irish gangs such as the Kinahans being “untouchable” in the United Arab Emirates, and that extraditing any of them from Dubai “would be slow”.
Recalling a visit to police in Bogotá in Colombia, he said “one of the sad things” he noticed in police headquarters was the number of local officers wearing prosthetic limbs. Many had stepped on anti-personnel mines during raids on cartels exporting hundreds of millions worth of cocaine each week to feed the habits of users in the US and Europe.
“Just think of the hypocrisy of users here who give no thought to the human cost, the injury and death, the ecological impact, the human trafficking, the complete ruination of a country or attempt of a ruination of a country,” he said.
Training now takes place annually between the Garda and police in Colombia because it is “very important” in building bilateral relationships “not just to be seeking, but to be offering help as well”.
Doubtful about the legalisation of currently illegal drugs, Harris said that both cocaine and heroin were legal substances to buy a century ago before the US and Europe “started to see the damage” both were causing.
